When starting any new business, the most important question you should ask yourself, is what PROBLEM are you actually solving? Lucky for us, the insurance experience that exists in the market today has many.

Sold, not bought

Although we know that most insurance brokers and agents are very nice people and we have nothing against them personally; we think they are simply not needed in a modern, connected, digital world. If insurance wasn’t such a complicated and intimidating topic and you could purchase, change and claim on your insurance instantly and without hassle, then whats the point of a middleman? We would rather deal directly with our customers and learn from them everyday and continuously improve what we offer. We can also avoid paying them commissions and make sure we keep our prices affordable for our entire insurance community.

Commodity products

Since most insurance products are still sold via the brokers and agents, over the years the coverages included in the products have been adapted, grouped together and others excluded to be easier to sell by these intermediaries. The products on the market have also become standardised to make them easier to compare by the intermediaries and comparison websites. Did you notice how the customer was not yet mentioned once in this paragraph? Isn’t the point of an insurance policy to provide coverage to the person that is buying the insurance. We think there is a mismatch here.

Confusing coverage

Insurance is not a simple topic, granted. But a lot more effort can be put into simplifying and visualising coverage so that people understand what they are actually buying. Rather than relying on the guy in a suit to “explain” (sell) the coverage; why can’t we research and learn about insurance products like any other product we buy in today’s world, digitally! “Ah no, but this is not like any other product, it’s more complex” the industry experts will say. That’s what experts said about banking, wealth management and investing for years; look how those industry have been transformed.

Paradox of trust

We always found it weird that insurance companies portray themselves as highly trusted institutions and that there should be no reason to doubt them in any way. But then when you need them the most, after something terrible happened and you need to make a claim, they don’t trust you. Most claim experiences feel more like an interrogation, where you need to present facts and written proof of the horrible event you just had. We call this the “paradox of trust”, insurance companies expect you to trust them but they don’t actually trust you.

We believe that this can be solved with a more human, customer centric approach. Through the tools of the modern world, the use of more contextual data and more transparency, we hope to know and understand our customer better than ever before and treat them as humans, not just policy holder #1037829.

Slow & hard to access service

Did you know that it takes three weeks for the average home contents insurance claim to be process in Germany? We did some sophisticated maths around the topic and calculated that it would take the same time for an adult tortoise to crawl from Berlin to Hamburg ! Now that is slow!

It is also sometimes really difficult to even find the right contact information to reach out to your insurance companies. In an age where you can instantly message anyone, even those who are on the other side of the planet, there is no reasons why contacting your insurance company should be any different.

So why is the industry still like this? Are we the only one’s who figured out is broken?

The short answer is no. The big insurance companies of the world all know that the customer experience is broken and are actually doing quite a lot to change that already. But because of all the years of organisational and technology legacy they have, it’s simply not as easy as it sounds. And will take many years to get better.

That’s why we built Coya. To start with a blank sheet and put the customer first at every step of the process. Stay tuned to learn more about what makes us tick!

How do you see insurance today? Would love to hear your views on this topic!